How many days of Christmas?

Sometimes I am astounded at the liberties taken by the commercial world today which sully and confuse any understanding of the traditions and seasonal festivals of the Christian church. A few years ago, I was struck by a series of ads by a local business which invited everyone to observe the 12 Days of Christmas with them. The idea was, they were designating the 12 days leading up to Christmas Day as special shopping days for your Christmas gifts. Now, this year, I have heard two local businesses promoting a similar line, one for 21 Days of Christmas, and the other for 18 Days of Christmas. As with the similar ads of several years ago, both were designating a certain number of shopping days, leading up to Christmas Day, and calling them so many Days of Christmas. It is to me an example of utterly ignoring the traditions of the church in celebrating Christmas, and of using Christian terminology in ways which confuse everything.

As a pastor for some 40 years, I have exerted considerable effort to arouse a better appreciation for the traditions of the church surrounding the Christmas festival, including the observance of the Twelve Days of Christmas. The Christmas scriptures never seem to anticipate that they could result in a seige of shopping days leading up to a big climax on Christmas Day. The scriptures also certainly don't lay out an extended 12-day festival either, but at least in the Scriptures, Christmas is not seen as concluding with the birth of the Christ Child. Christmas is a beginning of new things, a beginning of a new time in the world.

In Luke's story of the shepherds in the field, Luke 2:15, they are saying to one another: "Let us go over to Bethlehem to see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us."

I like to take that as a theme for all our Christmas activities and practices, that is, discovering what the Lord is doing and what the Lord is showing us as he sent his Son into the world for his work of salvation. The shepherds' visit to the family of Jesus in Bethlehem was not just a one-time thing, it set in motion a whole chain of conversations and reflections and ongoing responses. Although many of our church pageants bring the wise men from the east into Bethlehem's stable setting, a reading of the passage in Matthew 2:1-12, and especially the 11th verse, shows that the family of Jesus and Mary and Joseph were no longer in a stable, but in a house, and that the time is probably a few days after the night of Jesus's birth.

My main point, here, is that the first Christmas didn't just happen as one climactic day and then was over; it unfolded over several days, and it unfolded as a beginning of new things, as the opening of a new season of life, and not as something to be concluded in a day. Additionally, to the Christian church, the Christmas season is not something to observe, get through, and get over with; it is instead a season which seeks to awake the world to the gospel of Christ, an invitation to look to God's future, an invitation to continue a discovery of what God is doing through his Son the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Christian church has observed two great gospel festivals, Christmas, which celebrates the Incarnation, God's presence with us in human form, and Easter, which celebrates the Savior who was raised from death and lives eternally. Both festivals are preceded by brief seasons of preparation. The four Sundays before Christmas are observed as Sundays of Advent. The Christmas festival begins on Christmas Day, Dec. 25, and continues for 12 days, concluding on Jan. 6. Beginning on Jan. 6, the season of Epiphany turns the focus to revealing Christ to the wider world.

There were Twelve Days of Christmas long before there was a cute song by that name, and they weren't about partridges in pear trees.

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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist and a retired Methodist minister. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Religion on 12/31/2014